In recent years, digital cameras and personal computers have become widespread. Data generated by the digital cameras or the personal computers may be printed by ink jet printers or laser printers. These printers adhere ink or toner onto a printable medium, such as paper. The ink or toner may be stored, for example, in a cartridge. The cartridge may then be replaced when the ink or the toner is consumed.
In the case of significant ink or toner consumption, as the frequency of replacement of the cartridge is increased, the cost for purchasing the cartridge becomes higher. In fact, a significant cost associated with owning a printer is that of replacing used printer cartridges. While the price of printers is currently decreasing, the price of printer cartridges generally does not. Thus a user may be persuaded to buy a printer because it is less expensive, but is then committed to frequent purchases of more expensive printer cartridges.
One way to reduce the costs associated with buying replacement printer cartridges is to use less ink/toner so that each printer cartridge lasts longer, and needs to be replaced less frequently. The software print drivers which are provided with printers and installed on the controlling computer may offer a user the option of printing in, for example, “draft,” “economy,” or “high quality” mode, where “draft” and “economy” modes use less ink/toner than “high quality” mode. However, “draft” mode may provide such poor print quality that documents printed using this mode may not be usable for anything except for quick checks of content and proofing. “Economy” mode may yield better image output than “draft” mode, but may not provide the quality required for most documents intended for distribution to the intended audience. In fact, use of “draft” or “economy” modes may lead to even greater usage of ink/toner as the same document is printed several times, for example, once in a lower quality mode and then again in a higher quality mode.
There have been proposed methods for calibrating the image data to be printed to reduce ink or toner consumption without deteriorating the quality of the image printed. For example, according to a method disclosed in U.S. Pat. Appln. No. 2005/0063749 (Harris et al.), published Mar. 24, 2005, image data may be calibrated according to an ink reduction amount set by a user and then transmitted to a printer driver, thereby reducing ink consumption by the printer. However, even with the same ink reduction amount, the degree with which quality of the printed image may deteriorate as a result of such calibration may vary depending on the type of image to be printed based on the image data (e.g., photographs taken by digital cameras or documents) or the type of paper being printed on (e.g., glossy paper or plain paper). For example, when a larger ink reduction amount is set for image data for photographic images, the resultant image quality may deteriorate more than expected. This may necessitate a user to reprint the same image at a lower ink reduction level, thus causing larger ink consumption. Conversely, when a smaller ink reduction level is set to improve the image quality for a document, ink consumption may not be reduced effectively.